“He would ever reckon it amongst the chief misfortunes of his life that he did never know her that gave it him.”—Robert Boyle’s Philaretus.
A fortnight later, there was a christening in the private chapel at Lismore. The Earl’s chaplain and cousin, Mr. Robert Naylor, officiated, and a large house-party gathered for the event. Lady Castlehaven, who was to be the child’s godmother, arrived with her family and retinue just in time, and the godfathers were Lord Digby and Sir Francis Slingsby. Lord Digby was living in the house as a newly made son-in-law, and the boy was to be named Robert after him.
The Earl’s large family of “hopeful children” were already growing up and scattering when this fourteenth baby made its appearance among them. Alice, the eldest daughter, at nineteen, had been for some years the wife of young David Barry, the “Barrymore” who had been brought up in the family almost like one of the Earl’s sons. Sarah, the second, at a tender age, had been transferred to the care of the Earl’s old friend, Lady Moore, at Mellifont, and was married, on the same day as her sister Alice, to Lady Moore’s son. He died very soon afterwards; and Sarah, at seventeen, had been a little widow for three years, living again under her father’s roof; and on the Christmas Day before Robert Boyle’s birth, Sarah had been married a second time—to Robert, Lord Digby, in her father’s chapel at Lismore.
Lettice, the third daughter, had been intended for Lady Castlehaven’s son, but the young man’s religious views were “not conformable”; and she and her sister Joan were accordingly kept at home, with a London season in view. “Dick,” the now eldest son and heir, already “my Lord Dungarvan,” was at home, being mildly tutored by the Earl’s chaplain, and living in a boy’s paradise of saddle-horses and “faier goshawks,” with an “eyrie of falcons” and occasional “fatt bucks” and “junkettings”; but little Katharine, who came next, had been sent away into England to Lady Beaumont—at Coleorton in Leicestershire—mother of Sapcott Beaumont, the little girl’s prospective husband. Geoffrey, who would have been ten years old when Robert was born, had died as a baby. Tradition says he tumbled into a well in the Earl’s Walk in Youghal; but the Earl’s diary, in mentioning the death, makes no reference to the well. Dorothy, now nine years old, was already destined for Arthur Loftus, Sir Adam Loftus’s son; and in the autumn before Robert’s birth she had been fetched away to be brought up in the Loftus family at Rathfarnham. Francis and Mary were quite young children in the nursery; and now Robert, the fourteenth baby, as soon as he “was able without danger to support the incommodities of a remove,” was to be carried away from Lismore in the arms of his “Country Nurse.”[18] The Earl, so Robert Boyle says, had a “perfect aversion to the habit of bringing up children so nice and tenderly that a hot sun or a good shower of rain as much endangers them as if they were made of butter or of sugar.” Lady Cork’s opinions do not seem to have been asked; perhaps, in those three-and-twenty years, she had taught herself to think, if not to feel, in unison with her “owne goode selfe.” And so Robert Boyle, like his brothers and sisters, was to be reared during those first months of his life by a foster-mother, and owing to the movements of his family at this time was to be left with her longer than he would perhaps otherwise have been. He was to be rocked in an Irish cradle, or rather nursed, Irish fashion, in a “pendulous satchell” instead of a cradle, with a slit for the baby’s head to look out of.[19] By slow degrees, this boy, born amid all the pomp and seventeenth-century splendour of his father’s mansions, was to be inured to “a coarse but cleanly diet,” and to what he afterwards so characteristically described as “the passions of the air.” They gave him, he says, “so vigorous a complexion” that ‘hardships’ were made easy to him by ‘custom,’ while the delights and conveniences of ease were endeared to him by their ‘rarity.’
Happy months of babyhood, lulled in a cottage mother’s arms, or suspended, between sleeping and waking, in that fascinating medium that was to become afterwards his life-study! Wise little head of Robert Boyle, looking out of that slit in the “pendulous satchell,” baby-observer of the firelight, and the sunlight and the shadows, enjoying, without theory, as he swung in it, the “spring of the air”! And meantime the baby’s family was preparing for a season in London.
The House of Lismore was still being “re-edified” during the months that followed the birth of “Robyn.” The gardens and terraces were being laid out; the orchard wall was still building. Dick, the eldest son, and Arthur Loftus, the destined son-in-law, had been allowed to go to Dublin for the horse-races, with allowance for “wyne and extraordinaryes,” “horse-meat,” “small sums,” and “idle expenses.” The Earl liked to give presents: each New Year in his diary is a record of presents given and received; and while he seems to have kept the laced shirts and nightcaps made for him by his daughters, he had a habit of handing on the more costly gifts to other people. He was at this time tipping his musicians at Lismore, and commissioning his trusty emissary, Sir John Leeke, to buy smock-petticoats for Lady Cork and her mother Lady Fenton, who, since Sir Geoffrey’s death, had made her home for the most part with her daughter and her great son-in-law. And the Earl had given his married daughters a breeding mare apiece—each mare “with a colt at her feet,” while braces of bucks and saddle-hackneys had been dispersed among various friends. His daughter Sarah’s (Lady Digby’s) first child—a great event in the family—was born at Lismore in October; and towards the end of 1627, with the London visit in view, the Earl dispatched a footman with letters into England. Early in the spring of 1628, Sarah, with her lord and baby, left Lismore; in April, Mary Boyle was fetched away to be brought up under Lady Clayton’s charge at Cork; Lady Fenton also left Lismore; and little Francis was carried off to Youghal by Sir Lawrence Parson’s lady. As the visit to England drew nearer, the Earl made his last will and testament—in duplicate. “Thone” copy was to be locked up in his great iron chest at Lismore, which was fitted with three keys, to be left with three trusted kinsmen, who were to add to the chest the Earl’s moneys as they accumulated; and “thother” copy was to be carried by the Earl himself into England.
On April 21st a great cavalcade—the Earl and his wife, with their two daughters, Lettice and Joan, and the rest of their party and retinue—set out for Youghal, where on May 7th they took shipping (a captain had been hired to “wafte them over”) and reached London on May 16th;—not without adventures, for they were chased by a Dunkirker of 300 tons, and though the family escaped, the footmen and horses following in another barque were taken and carried off to sea.
That London season of 1628, when Charles I was the young King of England! What a busy, self-important, gratifying time it was, and what an amount of feeing and tipping and social engineering was requisite to carry it through! The Earl was received by the Duke of Buckingham and presented to the King. He engaged a steward for his household, and rented my Lord Grandison’s house in Channell Row, Westminster.[20] In June Lady Cork and her daughters were presented to the Queen, who kissed them all most graciously. Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, a very well-known man among the aristocracy as “the jerkin-maker of St. Martin’s”, was sent for to receive his orders. The Earl must have had his mind fully occupied and his purse-strings loose; for there were at least two troublesome lawsuits going on at this time about his Irish estates and industries, and he was employing the great Glanville as his legal adviser. But nothing seems to have interfered with the somewhat stodgy gaieties of that London season of 1628. And in preparation there were purchases of upholstery and table-linen in Cheapside; of “wares” for the ladies of the family, in Lombard Street; velvet, cloth of gold, and what-not. How different all this from the old-young life in the shabby chambers in the Middle Temple, or the weeks spent in the Gate-house, waiting to be called before Queen Elizabeth! But the great self-made man had not forgotten the old days. He had always given a helping hand to his own kith and kin: Ireland was sprinkled with his “cozens.” His brother John, the poor parson of Lichfield, had the good fortune to at least die Bishop of Cork. And now, on this visit to London, the Earl had no intention of neglecting his “cozen,” the lawyer Naylor of Gray’s Inn, or his “cozen” the vintner Croone of the King’s Head Tavern in Fleet Street.[21]
The Earl of Bedford had offered his house of Northall for the autumn; and visits were paid in state, with coaches and horses, to the Bedford family and to the Earl’s old Chief, Carew. Carew, now Earl of Totness, lived at Nonsuch, near Epsom, the wonderful house of Henry VIII’s reign, set in its park of elms and walnuts, with its gilded and timbered outside, ornamented with figures of stucco, and paintings by Rubens and Holbein.[22] Little wonder, in the circumstances, that the Earl of Cork’s coachmen and footmen all demanded new liveries.
In August the whole family removed to Northall, and later in the year they visited Lord and Lady Digby at Coleshill in Warwickshire, and Lady Beaumont at Coleorton in Leicestershire. Here the match between “Katy” and Sapcott Beaumont was broken off, the money arrangements not satisfying the Earl, and Katy was handed over to Lady Digby’s charge. While the Cork cavalcade were moving about from one great house to another, there came the news of the murder of Buckingham at Portsmouth; but this tragic event did not interfere with a visit to Oxford in September. The party that set out from Coleshill, on September 1st, included Lady Digby, whose second baby was born inconveniently the day after their arrival in Oxford, in the house of Dr. Weston, Lady Cork’s uncle, in Christchurch. “Dick” was now at Christchurch, with Arthur Loftus and the young Earl of Kildare; and Lettice and Joan both met their fates during this visit, Lettice marrying, very soon after, George Goring, handsome, plausible, dissolute and cold; while Joan was promised to the wild young “Faerie Earle” of Kildare.